[Eat the rich? Poison the poor! On regulatory capture and the class wars at their ugliest. The question that defines the corporatocracy: Who does our government represent? *RON*]

Julie Dermansky, DeSmog Blog, 28 May 2017
A group of residents in St. Gabriel, a suburb of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is no stranger to industrial pollution. The small town is on the banks of the Mississippi River in a stretch of land between New Orleans and Baton Rouge containing more than 100 petrochemical factories. To the industry, it’s known as the “Petrochemical Corridor,” but to everyone else it’s “Cancer Alley.” This fact is fueling a local drive to stop any new industrial plans that would add to the area’s already heavy pollution burden.

The Louisiana Environmental Action Network (LEAN) has been assisting the Citizens for a Better St. Gabriel, a citizens group formed with the goal of halting one such company from expanding operations in their neighborhood.

Paul Brass provides a wealth of ethnographic and historical evidence on the causes of Hindu-Muslim violence in India in The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India. His analysis here centers on the city of Aligarh in Uttar Pradesh, and he believes that his findings have broad relevance in many parts of India. His key conclusion is worth quoting:

It is a principal argument of this book that the whole political order in post-Independence north India and many, if not most of its leading as well as local actors -- more markedly so since the death of Nehru -- have become implicated in the persistence of Hindu-Muslim riots. These riots have had concrete benefits for particular political organizations as well as larger political uses. Hindu-Muslim opposition, tensions, and violence have provided the prin…

[It looks like the one who did the ousting is close to being ousted; Brazil is a steaming mess. *RON*]
The unbalanced evolution of homo sapiens, 28 May 2017

Brazil's Temer govt revokes army deployment decree amid outrage

Brazil's government revoked Thursday a presidential decree deploying the military in Brasilia to quell mass protests against unelected President Michel Temer, high-level corruption and unpopular neoliberal austerity measures.

The government deployed soldiers Wednesday to crack down on the popular uprising, claiming that riot police forces were unable to handle the tens of thousands of demonstrators that flooded the streets of the capital city to demand Temer's resignation and early elections to choose a new president before the scheduled 2018 ballot. Organizers estimated the protests boasted a turnout of 150,000 demonstrators under the banner "Occupy Brasilia," a massive crowd in the city of about 3 millio…

Public disenchantment with democracy as a system of government has grown consistently in recent decades, with Gallup surveys showing a large decline of confidence in democratic institutions. The number of Americans having confidence in citizens to make good judgments “under our democratic system” is at a historic low of 56 percent. An alarming 40 percent of the population has “lost faith” in U.S. democracy, according to a poll published in the Washington Post last year. The levels of frustration reflected in these surveys — all pre-Trump administration — reveal the preconditions for dark political developments. The imperative to understand their causes could not be greater.